Intellectual Quotes

I’m not an intellectual in any sense, I have constraints of erudition. I’m not able to deal with things outside my ken, and that makes me irritable. I’m irritable about the fact that I never went to university.

To the intellectual, America’s unforgivable sin is that it has revolutions without revolutionaries, and achieves the momentous in a matter-of-fact way.

Christianity is the greatest intellectual system the mind of man has ever touched.

The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.

Intellectuals have an obsession with equality and with the condition of the underdog. This obsession goes hand in hand with the conviction that theories and thinking provide the solution to our social problems, and that the intellectual is entitled to his ‘leading role’ on these grounds alone. In fact there is nothing surprising in this. […]

One of the chief problems a modern society has to face is how to provide an outlet for the intellectual’s restless energies and yet deny him power. How to make and keep him a paper tiger.

Intellectual “work” is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the […]

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.

The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we’ve been producing is footnotes.

The course of every intellectual, is he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the nonintellectuals have never stirred.